Fire Phone: first impressions and tips

since Thursday, which has given me an opportunity to use it over the weekend and at work.

I can say that the best is yet to come.😉

This is a new and radically different device. Think of the people who bought the first automobiles, before there were purpose built roads. They had to bounce and rattle along over streets intended for entirely different vehicles. It wasn’t until people responded to the invention that it became completely indispensable.

At this point, the Fire Phone’s two breakthrough features (Firefly and Dynamic Perspective, which I call “dyper”) are like that.

I’m coming to the Fire Phone from a Galaxy S4…and I have an iPhone 5S that I use for work. The iPhone is new for me (the way Apple handled e-books left a bad taste in my mouth for their products), but I do have some experience with it.

I wouldn’t say I’m a power user of SmartPhones: not like I am with Kindles. However, I do know what I’m doing and I use them quite a bit.

At first, I found the Fire Phone’s interface less easy to use than my S4. After doing more research, playing around with it, and making a couple of calls to Mayday (the almost instant live online screen tech help…which is a huge plus for the FP over anything else), it’s growing on me.

It does all of the basics fine: e-mail, calendar, text.

The navigation is new. Without learning that, the phone can seem frustrating, like it takes a lot of steps to get anywhere.

Let’s talk this through.

The way I have the phone set, I turn it on by pushing a power button once…reasonable.

The lock screens look amazing! They have dyper…just by moving my head, I can see more of the image. For example, I have a neon sign up right now, like a tourist trap in the desert (it includes the date and time). By moving my head (even from probably half a meter away from the phone), I can see the streetlamps which are otherwise off the screen. I can see how many new e-mails I have, the signal strength and battery level.

To unlock it, I swipe up from the bottom…that’s an adjustment for me, I’m used to going side to side. However, as an ambidexter, I appreciate that it isn’t better for right or left handers.🙂

I’ve put a password on mine.

Once it opens up, there is a Carousel, like there is an a Kindle Fire. It’s going to be easier for Kindle Fire users to adapt to this phone than other people.

At the bottom of the screen are four icons:

Phone

Messaging

Email

Silk Browser

Here’s the first thing you might not realize.

Swipe those four icons up, and you’ll be on the apps screen.

It will default to being the apps on your device, but you can switch it to the Cloud easily enough (it’s an obvious choice in your top left corner).

Okay, here’s are a few gestural things on this homescreen which aren’t intuitive.

In addition to swiping from the left or right side, you can just “flick” the phone.

Flick it where you are turning the phone with a rapid motion with the left side getting closer to you, and you reveal the main navigation. That has

APPS

GAMES

WEB

MUSIC

VIDEOS

PHOTOS

BOOKS

NEWSSTAND

AUDIOBOOKS

DOCS

SHOP

PRIME

Flick it back to remove that menu.

Generally, that left menu will be available in most places you are working, and will be the same.

Flick it the other way, with the right side getting closer to you, and you’ll reveal a context sensitive menu…one that varies depending on what you are doing.

ON the home screen, I get a weather report (which I could set to be in Celsius, my favorite…and which autodetected my location), and Google Now type cards. Right now, I’m seeing calendar events, but I may see an e-mail from people I designate, or texts. There is an ellipsis (“…”) at the bottom to go to the full calendar.

Flick left, flick right: two of the main gestures.

Three other big gestures:

Tip the phone to one side (either direction), and you’ll see a ribbon at the top with quick access to functions:

Airplane mode

Wi-Fi

Bluetooth

Flashlight

Sync

Settings

Mayday

Search

Brightness

How would you know what they were?

You peek.

Really, that’s what they call it.

Move your head to the side and look back at the phone, like you are trying to look behind the icons.

The captions magically appear.

You’ll use that a lot.

The last gesture I’ll mention is how to get back to what you were doing last.

The first couple of days, I really missed the Back button on my S4. Then, one of the Mayday reps told me that you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen. They didn’t describe it quite right: the thing is that you start off the edge of the screen at the bottom, at about the same level as the home button. Then swipe up on to the screen: that will take you back to the last function.

Before I go on, let me say that is seems to drink battery charge like a Chevrolet Suburban drinks gasoline!😉 Just while I’ve been writing this post, it went down four percent. I expect that will get better after I play with some settings.

In terms of the pre–installed apps, I recommend that you play with Clay Doodle and Monkey Buddy (although the latter might drive you crazy, if you are an adult). The first one is like Play-Doh, and takes advantage of the dyper. The second one is a virtual pet, like a Tamagotchi in concept. Since it can see where you head is, it responds to you nodding your head yes in approval, for example.

Believe it or not, the integration with Amazon could be better. My Prime music wasn’t available until I downloaded an app…that was weird. My biggest disappointment so far has been that gestural scrolling doesn’t work in the Kindle app! It only works in Silk on websites.

I was really looking forward to having an endless scroll in my Kindle books, where I could get to the next text by just moving my head or tilting the phone.

A Mayday rep told me that an update is coming soon which will include more functionality…and better interface with the Kindle app is one of the things we may see. Right now, you can get the X-Ray background data by flicking from the right…good to know, right?🙂

I may do a full menu map at some point (that kind of thing might make a good short “book” for people to borrow through Kindle Unlimited), but let’s go through the settings at a high level:

Wi-Fi & Networks

Connect to Wi-Fi

Enable Airplane Mode

Pair Bluetooth Devices

Set up a Wi-Fi hotspot (only if that’s part of your data plan, I think)

Enable NFC (Near Field Communication)

Turn off cellular dta usage

See your cellular data usage

Change your mobile network operator

Display

Adjust screen brightness

Turn off automatic screen rotation

Hide (or show…the commands change based on current state) status bar

Change time to sleep

Share your screen via Miracast

Configure low motion settings (this will turn off some of the gestural stuff, which would be useful for those with unsteady hands or heads)

Sounds & Notifications

Change your ringtone

Manage notifications

Select ringtones for specific people

Select text message tones for specific people

Change volume levels (there are also physical volume buttons)

Change touch feedback settings (my first call to Mayday: how to turn off hepatic feedback, the vibrating you get when you touch a key…I just don’t like it, and it uses battery charge)

Applications & Parental Controls

Configure Amazon application settings

Manage applications

Prevent (or enable) non-Amazon app installation

Turn off product recommendations

Enable Parental Controls

Battery & Storage

View battery usage (the system is taking 50% of my usage right now)

View available storage

Free space on your phone (not how much you have…this one is designed to free up space)

Configure voice settings (oh, it does take voice commands…hold down the home button, like accessing Siri. I have found that I have to say “Search the Web” to get it to do that…it doesn’t just guess that’s what you want if you say something for which it doesn’t have a command)

Change Text to Speech (TTS) language (it does have TTS for Kindle books…it comes with English and Spanish, but you can download quite a few others for no additional cost)

Help & Feedback

Get help from Mayday (there is a lifesaver for that on the quick access ribbon…remember, you can tip your phone quickly for that, or swipe down from the top. Use it to get the most out of your phone)

Browse online help

Contact Amazon technical support

Provide feedback

There, that gives you a pretty good idea of its capabilities.

Overall, I’m starting to like it. If you want everything to be easy, if you want it to be as good as the most popular other phones, you may not want to be an early adopter. You can download apps to do things it doesn’t do right now (in many cases), but a year from now, it will be much more capable…I suspect it will be a lot more capable before the holidays.

It’s certainly satisfactory…and the hardware (the four cameras that enable dyper) and Firefly (the real world recognition system) promise much greater things in the future, once people start designing for it. The killer apps are yet to come.

I think it’s a great first SmartPhone (which is where I think the market is), and an adequate transition phone (with amazing potential).

Hey, my Kindle app has an update available! That sort of thing is going to happen a lot…I won’t focus on the Fire Phone a lot in this blog (just as I haven’t done that with the Fire Phone), but it is a Kindle reading device, and I think it deserves some coverage here.

If you have any specific questions about it, or things to say, feel free to comment on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

5 Responses to “Fire Phone: first impressions and tips”

Thanks! This is a really great overview for someone who doesn’t have the phone yet.

I’ve just been watching “This Week In Tech” over on twit.tv, and Leo LaPorte (after saying the 4.7″ screen size was ideal) proceeded to blast the Fire Phone — that he couldn’t recommend it. His primary gripe is that in the carousel under the highlighted item much of the screen real estate is taken up with ads for related products you could buy on Amazon (with a couple of exceptions like for the email app). He found that very annoying. One of his panelists wondered why Amazon hadn’t given (as with their kindles) you the option to dispense with the ads for a price.

Everyone felt that the price was too high. One panelist acknowledged that the 1 year Prime offer was in fact a $100 discount, but then another (a columnist for mashable.com) said no — that was only for new Prime subscribers (she didn’t even know about the 1 year extension for existing prime members — and I wonder why the tech blogosphere is causing my teeth to be ground down to nothing😀 ).

It is a valid point though: when you are new and late to the party, you can’t just muscle your way in with novel features — you need to buy market share through deep discounting — just as Google recently did with their recent entry into the cloud (and to Amazon’s AWS cost vis a vis current earnings). Amazon is big enough that they could have priced the phone at $100 (on contract), and an option to get rid of some of the more egregious Amazon shopping stuff for a fee.

Leo is also missing the Google app store and said Amazon should not have forked Android — completely missing the point that if you incorporate the Google service stack, your customers have to log in to Google — meaning that Amazon would be giving Google access to Amazon’s crown jewels: their customer data — not ever gonna happen.

That said Amazon should do a deal to integrate a 3rd party app store into the FireOS enviroment that can make access to all the non-Google app store apps more easily available. For the handful of Google apps (Gmail, YouTube, G+, etc), Amazon should aggressively develop in-house apps to these services with features equal to or better than what Google provides.

Yes, it’s irritating when someone makes an incorrect statement like that…many people will remember it. I’ve met Leo LaPorte (to be clear, according to you, Leo didn’t make the incorrect statement): nice guy.🙂

I have no problem getting apps designed for Android from 1Mobile for my Amazon devices, including the Fire Phone…I’ll check a bit more on the specific Google ones, but I get gmail on the native app, and I use Tubemate for YouTube…when I want to do that.

Could you comment on screen brightness outdoors in full sunlight as compared to your other phones, please? I sort of remember reading somewhere that Amazon used a screen with a greater level of brightness, i.e., greater than 300 NITS.

Well, I will say that it looks better for me, but my vision is not typical. I have some color vision deficiency, often called color blindness, which, from what I’ve heard, gives me superior night vision. I don’t keep it on auto. I keep the brightness turned down pretty far.